How to Learn Mentalism

At first glance, mentalism is simply mind reading. As soon as you step a little further into the world of magic, you quickly realise it isn't that simple.

Mentalism is hard to define, because its boundaries with magic are blurred, and many magicians carry elements of both magic and mentalism in their repertoire. Sometimes, mentalism is more of a label that certain magicians give themselves, a matter of style or brand, and the audience lacks the knowledge to trace a clear distinction.

In general, magic is the gateway to mentalism.

Mentalism is often more complex than magic, because there's more focus on the performer, on their acting abilities, on the spoken word, and less on the trick itself, on magic as visual shock.

Understanding what mentalism is, what its effects and methods are, is fundamentally important — both for those who actually want to call themselves a "mentalist," and for those who, without that desire, simply want to improve as a magician.

At One Ahead, we give magicians (and mentalists!) the tools to improve, through the knowledge and experience of our writers, who perform and create professionally all over the world.

You're in the right place.

Certain routines can be performed by either a magician and a mentalist and be defined in completely different ways.

Take a coin bend routine, for example: performed by Derren Brown and by David Blaine, it will have a very different feeling in each case — in the first it will be called mentalism, in the second magic.

The difference lies in where the attention of the effect sits, because it's always magic tricks we're dealing with (spoiler: mentalism uses magic methods too!).

What changes is the focus of the presentation, the performer's character, the script of the effect, the relationship with the audience, the wider narrative the effect is part of.

This is good news, because it means that magicians who want to become mentalists very likely already own the material and the methods they need. It's the rest they have to work on.

A prime example is the English mentalist Derren Brown, who popularised modern mentalism. He started out as a card magician, and even as a mentalist he still performs card tricks, but in a rather unique way. Any magician would benefit by learning how Derren Brown performs Any Card at Any Number.

Be careful, though: this doesn't mean it's enough to take magic material and give it a mystical feeling, or anything that resembles a stereotypical idea of "mentalism."

The point, as we'll see, is something else, and it has to do with character, the human relationship with the audience, and the psychology of performance.

Despite these overlaps between magic and mentalism, there are still certain plots that are the mentalist's signature pieces and that are closely associated with mentalism itself.

The first is mind reading.

If you already know some close-up magic methods, you'll realise that to fake reading someone's mind, you can even just use a key card and reveal a chosen card.

That's true, and in that case you'd need to work extra hard on the best ways to reveal selected cards, so that it's closer to what a mentalist does than to what a magician does.

To be a mentalist, though, you have to go beyond cards. This is why mentalists often find themselves revealing the names of people they couldn’t know, or personal stories from strangers.

Without getting too personal, a strong feat is also to be able to guess which number is rolled on a die.

The second type of common mentalism effect is predicting the future.

Sometimes it is presented as a skill, other times as chance or an incredible coincidence. Other times the prediction is the result of choices made by audience members, who therefore, in the storytelling of the performance, become able to play the part of mentalists.

If you're a magician who wants to venture into mentalism, predicting the future isn't that hard.

The simplest way is to use the most widespread gimmick in card magic, the Invisible Deck – you should read our analysis on the best presentation for the Invisible Deck.

Predicting the future doesn't require big apparatus: at One Ahead we even explain a prediction trick using any watch and a gift card prediction effect.

Then, once the mentalist moves to the stage, the prediction usually gets paired with big envelopes or boxes hanging from above. If you've ever seen one of these boxes, know that it's a very common prop: it's called a Master Prediction Box.

The good news is that you can build a Master Prediction Box on a budget of just $5.

Magicians often think a prediction is stronger the bigger it is visually and the further it is from the performer. That can be true, but it isn't necessarily the rule.

What matters far more is the value the spectators place on the process of choosing: primarily how involved they feel, and how much it means to them that the prediction is correct. A great shortcut for this is the use of time-sensitive tricks.

In short, it's essential that mentalism, and predicting the future in particular, isn't a mere exercise in style, but that there's a lot at stake. A great example of this is the Lottery Prediction trick, popularised by Derren Brown himself.

Normally it’s a quite expensive routine to perform, but we put together a self-working method to perform Lottery Prediction that you can learn.

Another routine very common among mentalists is the so-called Book Test.

In its purest form, the effect has a spectator take a book, leaf through its pages until they find a word they like, choose a word on that page, and then the mentalist will be able to say what that word is.

It's a very strong effect, which can draw on a range of methods such as peeking the word, forcing a specific page, or the use of gaffed books. Other versions rely on genuine memorisation skills, such as the Hoy Book Test.

You can even learn a Book Test method that uses your phone as a secret tool.

The Book Test, though, lets us touch on another fundamental point of mentalism theory: the importance of the context in which it happens. Mentalism requires the right atmosphere precisely because it rests on the need to create a relationship with the audience.

When it comes to using books, you need the right context to introduce books as a prop in the first place. So it's essential to perform this effect in a setting where books are naturally already present.

Mentalists also perform a whole series of other routines that mostly have in common the idea that the performer has some kind of extravagant ability that lets them do unique things. So we come back to the idea that mentalism is based on a skill of some kind, at least in its presentation.

We teach how to do many of these routines, such as how to speed up a watch with your mind or how to stop your pulse with magic. Believe it or not, we also teach how to make lightning strike on command!

One more effect specific to mentalism is the Drawing Duplication — the effect in which the mentalist reproduces a drawing made by a spectator without having seen it.

For the Drawing Duplication too, the methods often come from other areas of magic, especially peeking or forcing. Learning a Drawing Duplication is an excellent way to start doing mentalism with a routine that has a visual component.

You can learn a Costume Drawing Duplication method at One Ahead.

A big misconception about mentalism in recent years is that it's better when it's propless, that is, when it uses nothing but words.

On closer inspection, it doesn't make much sense; especially watching what the mentalists who enjoy great success with non-magician audiences actually do. 

This is often a belief used in the marketing of magic companies, because it makes mentalism more appealing to casual performers, selling methods as superpowers.

The truth is that superpowers don't exist (sorry!) and that propless mentalism is even more complex than mentalism with props, because it requires considerable acting skills and, above all, the right context. It’s also harder to provide variety to your audience.

Propless or not, it doesn't make much difference to the audience: the difference lies in the presentation you use and in how the audience will remember what you did.

This is why you need to know how magicians manipulate the audience's memories (yes, it's possible), and how to make your magic unforgettable.

As with magic in general, you can buy books on mentalism and learn methods online.

Generally, magic companies invest more in magic than in mentalism, precisely because the lack of a visual component makes mentalism products harder to sell and to demonstrate with fancy trailers.

This is changing, though, especially in an era when the spread of magic apps and hyper-technological gadgets makes it possible to sell not so much the effect itself, but the gadget or the app of the moment, which become the objects of desire.

Beyond the methods that mentalism and magic use in equal measure, there are some methods used far more by mentalism.

Among these, the two most common are pre-show and dual reality.

The pre-show is, generally, a piece of method that's done before the show begins. It usually serves to obtain or plant information that will then be revealed during the show.

The goal of pre-show is to create a frame that justifies obtaining that information in a way that still keeps the element of astonishment for the audience during the performance. You don’t want people to blurt out mid-performance that they said or saw those things beforehand.

Another way to do pre-show is not to obtain the information from the audience, but to force those things on them already, perhaps by giving them a limited set within which, during the performance, they can then make a free choice for which multiple outs are prepared.

We recommend studying how top magicians use pre-show: you’ll discover several clever applications, such as presenting it as if it were help for the spectators themselves.

During the performance, it's then essential that the performer uses an adequate script so that the spectator gives the desired answer without it seeming pre-arranged.

Two items often used as methods in the pre-show are the Impression Pad, which secretly copies something written by a spectator, and the SvenPad, which allows excellent forces of just about anything.

Dual reality is one of the most fascinating methods in magic and mentalism. It relies on the fact that one or more spectators have a different experience of what happens compared to the rest of the audience.

In a sense, pre-show has a dual reality component in itself, because the person who has already chosen an item from a list has a different perception than those who instead think that item was invented randomly on the spot.

Some approaches to dual reality are truly astonishing.

One of these is the dual force method, in which the principle is used to achieve a really clean force.

Where the pre-show often requires the use of assistants and the chance to put on an actual show, dual reality is within everyone's reach. We recommend digging into it if you're trying to move from magic to mentalism, maybe starting with three routines that use dual reality.

While it's true that mentalism often presents itself as a kind of skill, it's also true that the mentalism people love — the kind that sells tickets for big shows — puts this idea of skill at the service of the audience and a bigger message, not the performer's ego.

To do that, you’ll need a whole range of skills that belong to the world of acting and psychology, such as how to be present with your audience, how to control eye contact, body language tactics for magicians, how to influence spectators’ emotions, and more.

You also need to be able to create variety, which is hard in mentalism because of its scarce visual component. This means you have to play with themes, with your character, with the interaction with the audience.

One example above all is, again, Derren Brown, whose shows alternate funny bits with the audience and frightening stunts, passing through hypnosis and moments that are deep and touching. At One Ahead, we have revealed the formula Derren Brown uses to write sell-out shows.

On the other hand, when people don’t like a mentalist, they tend to say it’s because the mentalist “is boring”. They talk too much. They take the stage to lay out their own theories and to polish their ego, rather than to put themselves at the service of their audience.

So if something isn't working as you expect, maybe you need one piece of advice: just shut up. Check out our guide on the benefits of silence in magic. 

Mentalism isn't real. It's as real as making a coin vanish up your sleeve. There are methods, they get hidden, and those methods create an illusion.

Even more than magicians, though, mentalists have to ask themselves how their craft is perceived by the audience, precisely because the focus of the performance falls on their supposed skills.

Most mentalists give their audience explanations so their performance isn't misunderstood, and they find ways to explain that they have no real powers via so-called “pseudo-methods”. This is fundamental, because the last thing you want to do is con your audience.

Others, instead, choose to insist on the reality of what they do, at their own risk. The most notable example in modern mentalism is Uri Geller, who still is today a controversial figure.

Mentalism sparks a lot of interest, and magicians often pivot to mentalism for branding reasons alone, to become the only mentalist in their area, for example, and raise their fee.

It's a strategy not to underestimate. At One Ahead, we've revealed how famous magicians make money: becoming the best x in y truly helps when it comes to getting booked.

But you shouldn't let mere convenience guide you. Mentalism is a delicate craft. Doing it without proper care may tempt you to attribute your routines to some supposed superior capacity or intelligence.

Mentalists who lean on a talent of their own, supernatural or not, often do so for lack of anything better to offer their audience. And this is short-lived, because that talent will soon be surpassed by others with even greater talents, and the audience will move on, too.

To become relevant and unique, you need to work on the human and emotional connection, in order to create something sincere on stage, with care and respect.

That, people will care about.